Cable has also given graphic pictures of New Orleans. His poetic powers of description enabled him to make the picturesque streets, the quaint interiors, the swamps, bayous, forests, and streams very vivid realities to his readers. He has warmth of feeling and a most refined and subtle humor. His scenes are sometimes blood-curdling, his characters unusual, and the deeds described sensational; but in his best work, his manner is so quiet, his English so elegant, and his treatment so poetic, that the effect is never crude or harsh, but always mild and harmonious. JAMES LANE ALLEN, 1849- James Lane Allen was born in 1849 near Lexington, in the rich blue-grass section of Kentucky. He did not leave the state until he was twenty-two, so that his education both at school and college was received in Kentucky, and all his early and most impressionable years were passed amid Kentucky scenes. Many of these years were spent on a farm, where his faculty for observing was used to good advantage. As he grew older, he took his share in the farm work and labored in the fields of hemp, corn, and wheat, which he describes in his works. He graduated from Transylvania College, Lexington, and taught for several years, but after 1884 devoted himself to writing. [Illustration: JAMES LANE ALLEN] In 1891, Allen published _Flute and Violin and Other Kentucky Tales and Romances_. For artistic completeness, Allen wrote nothing superior to the story in this collection, entitled, _King Solomon of Kentucky_, a tale of an idle vagabond who proved capable of a heroism from which many heroes might have flinched. All of the stories are romantic and pathetic. _The Kentucky Cardinal_ (1894) and _Aftermath_ (1895) are poetic idyls, whose scenes are practically confined within one small Kentucky garden, where the strawberries grow, the cardinal sings, and the maiden watches across the fence her lover at his weeding. The compass of the garden is not too small to embody the very spirit of out-of-doors, which is continuously present in these two delightful stories. From the human point of view, _The Choir Invisible_ (1897) is Allen's strongest book. John Gray, Mrs. Falconer, and Amy are convincingly alive. No better proof of the vital interest they arouse is needed than the impatience felt by the reader at John's mistaken act of chivalry, which causes the bitterest sorrow to him and Mrs. Falconer. Allen's later works, _The Reign of Law_ (1900), _The Mettle of the Pasture_ (1903), _The Bride of the Mistletoe_ (1909), lose in charm and grace what they gain as studies of moral problems. The hardness and incompleteness of outline of the character portrayals and the grimness of spirit in the telling of the tales make these novels uninviting after the luxuriance of the earlier books.